![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thursday reading
Oct. 31st, 2013 08:39 pmCoot Club, Arthur Ransome (re-read). Dick and Dorothea spend Easter with their mother’s old schoolteacher, an artist staying (with her pug, William) in a hired yacht on the Norfolk Broads, meet the Coot Club (who sail and protect the native birds from egg-stealers and imprudently parked motor boats) and learn to sail. I do love the way Ransome does competence and responsibility; he is very good at having his characters make mistakes and deal with the consequences (We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, obviously, but just in this book, Tom’s setting the Margoletta adrift, and the Admiral’s decision to go into Breydon Water, and my personal favourite, Titty making the voodoo figure in Swallowdale).
He’s also the author who made me realise that parents were people, too; I think it’s in Swallowdale, again (I got this and Swallows and Amazons for, I think, my seventh birthday, and read them incessantly), where the children climb Kanchenjunga (the Coniston Old Man), and discover the record of their parents climbing it themselves, years earlier, and what they called it.
The Vine-Clad Hill, Mabel Esther Allan. Financially reduced Philippa agrees to accompany her wealthy Aunt Millicent to Switzerland, to help look after her three youngest children. The bits of this I really like are the lengthy process of travel from England to Switzerland, and exploring the area there; the other subplots, in which Philippa bonds with Tilda, the neglected middle child, gains the respect of the younger ones, and embarks on a tentative romance with a visiting Englishman (also at Cambridge, where Philippa herself is headed) are competent but predictable, which is probably the point.
Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge. I’ve read a lot of favourable reviews of her books. This is the first one I’ve read, and it didn’t really blow me away; I like the inventiveness of the world, I love Saracen (the goose) and the Cakes. Mosca herself (the lead) didn’t grab me all that much, and while the idea of the Shattered Realms appealed to me, the Birdcatchers didn’t.
At least one of the reviews compared Hardinge to Diana Wynne Jones. One of the things I love DWJ for, and didn’t get here, is seeing our world, but askew; forked (Witch Week), from an unexpected perspective (Power of Three) or with any number of odd additions, from The Ogre Downstairs to Archer’s Goon. The world of Fly by Night isn’t like that, whatever its basis. Having just checked her other books, I think the Hardinge I should try for next, therefore, is Verdigris Deep.
He’s also the author who made me realise that parents were people, too; I think it’s in Swallowdale, again (I got this and Swallows and Amazons for, I think, my seventh birthday, and read them incessantly), where the children climb Kanchenjunga (the Coniston Old Man), and discover the record of their parents climbing it themselves, years earlier, and what they called it.
The Vine-Clad Hill, Mabel Esther Allan. Financially reduced Philippa agrees to accompany her wealthy Aunt Millicent to Switzerland, to help look after her three youngest children. The bits of this I really like are the lengthy process of travel from England to Switzerland, and exploring the area there; the other subplots, in which Philippa bonds with Tilda, the neglected middle child, gains the respect of the younger ones, and embarks on a tentative romance with a visiting Englishman (also at Cambridge, where Philippa herself is headed) are competent but predictable, which is probably the point.
Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge. I’ve read a lot of favourable reviews of her books. This is the first one I’ve read, and it didn’t really blow me away; I like the inventiveness of the world, I love Saracen (the goose) and the Cakes. Mosca herself (the lead) didn’t grab me all that much, and while the idea of the Shattered Realms appealed to me, the Birdcatchers didn’t.
At least one of the reviews compared Hardinge to Diana Wynne Jones. One of the things I love DWJ for, and didn’t get here, is seeing our world, but askew; forked (Witch Week), from an unexpected perspective (Power of Three) or with any number of odd additions, from The Ogre Downstairs to Archer’s Goon. The world of Fly by Night isn’t like that, whatever its basis. Having just checked her other books, I think the Hardinge I should try for next, therefore, is Verdigris Deep.
